Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Awesome Interactive Fiction

[Dracos]

You know, it's not often that a game gives me a dilemma like Phoenix Wright does.  As an experience, Phoenix Wright succeeds...  which is important to me.  As Interactive Fiction, it's quite good.  As a game?  Not so much.  So how does one do a game review? Well, it'd be kind of unfair to just talk about how it wasn't a good game, but also misleading just talking about it being good as interactive fiction.  So instead, I'm going to do a little of both and try and acknowledge things from everywhere.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, for those who don't know, is a port of the original Turnabout Court to the DS.  Boosting a new case, four other case stories, and new DS features, it offers what is supposed to be an exciting lawyer action story.  Yeah, weird but true.

I'm not often a player of interactive fiction.  Or reader that is.  Sure, I keep up on the techniques, but it tends to have very different goals from gaming, with very good reasons, much as Painting and Movies both have to do with images people see while being entirely different arts.  I tend to thumb my nose in fact at most the IF culture, since it tends to put a huge emphasis on keeper a reader around long after giving them a reason to stay.  That said, Phoenix Wright is pretty good interactive fiction.  It's got snappy dialogue writing, good writing flow and pretty good control over the interactive experience, effective characters, and plots that are both familiar and at the same time make you want to keep reading to see what's going to happen.  It's the kind of interactive fiction you can give to someone who's not an art snob and have them thoroughly enjoy.  At it's worst, it's slow.  At it's best, it's quick, snappy, and energizing to read with good sound and animation inclusions to keep the fiction flow running smoothly.  On this front, I recommend it.  It's really worth checking out if you haven't already.

Naturally, speaking in almost the same vein, the graphics are lively, with nice exaggerated cartoon effects that really help tell the story and make sure you're clear what kind of world you're in and the music, while it can be repeative and is no where near as fun to listen to separately, tends to add solidly to the atmosphere of the moment.  Good enough for me, there.  Don't buy the OST.  Do keep the sound on while playing.

Built to be played/read on the go even on the original  GBA, it has a stellar 'stop and save' anywhere system.  Amazingly, using well known techniques, it manages to do this without destroying the game difficulty wand still providing hard save points at the end of each 'chapter' of a case.    Well done.  Good player centric design move there and well planned in notion of their original design goal that  this could be played in ten minute intervals on trains.

As a game, it's a text based adventure for the most part under an okay graphical user interface.  Nothing wrong with that persay... but the interface hurts it in a lot of cases and certain decisions were made to favor the interactive fiction over gameplay (fine) and often interactivity  (not so fine).  The game has two main gameplay modes: In the courtroom and gathering evidence.  Let's go over each individually.

Gathering evidence is what you're doing any time you're not directly in trial.  You can't really miss evidence as the game won't let you go to court until you've gotten all the evidence and triggered all the flags in it.  This is good on one front, you can't enter the courtroom in a no win situation.  This is bad on three other fronts:
A)You have no sense of time or urgency other than what you tell yourself.  Yes, it's good that there's no penalty for going to the wrong place, but when you don't know where the game wants you to go, it makes it a 'go to all places' thing.  It breaks up the reality.  On a game front, it'd be better to be timed and to have a little clearer clues on where you might want to go next.  By doing so, the evidence gathering would be more exciting and feel more pertinent.
B)You can get stuck with the game waiting for you to trigger a flag.  Sometimes the flags are obvious "Go to this area and talk to said person".  Sometimes they are not and with the game sometimes changing the rules on how it wants the player to behave, there's more potential than I would like for a player to get stuck.
C)Sometimes the flag is doing something stupid in the gameworld, such as giving the villain the compelling evidence  against him or knowingly walking into a trap without asking for support from any of your in game allies.  These bugged me.  Sure, I figured them out, but even seeing them, they weren't actions I wanted to perform in character.  I couldn't see any reason for them to happen in certain later cases (Once is inexperience, two or more times?  What you trying to lose evidence?).  This can easily be a halt point for people really get into character and trying to figure out some other way of triggering the trial aside from "HANDING IMPORTANT EVIDENCE TO VILLIAN'.

Naturally, as might be guessed, this mode doesn't let you lose.  Beyond just not letting you start a court case in an un-winnable state, there's no way to make a mistake in this mode ever.  Good interactive fiction, bad game design.  There's no risk, no worthwhile decisions to make.  At worst, you don't get to hear a part of story and that's only if you ask in odd orders.  Solidly asking from top to bottom and constantly moving never misses anything ever.

Beyond that, the interface for navigating through places is poor.  When you want to go somewhere, you often have  to go through 3-4 menu instances to get through a very old fashioned environment layout.  The environment layout isn't the problem, but the fact that they didn't put together a better interface here hindered this game mode.  At least as much time is spent going into menus to move between areas as is actually finding exciting stuff.  There's no reason if you 'have' to walk through 4 spots to get to  a place, they couldn't walk you through virtually and only stop you if someone would stop you at that place, rather than having you walk through each.

On every game screen in investigate mode there's the opportunity to examine, talk to a person (if one is there), present (if someone is there to present evidence to), or move to allowed areas from it.  The examine setup is okay, but not great.  The good about it is it tells you if you are over something important and often uses reasonably broad detection areas so you can know if you can examine something.  It also includes irrelevant stuff, which is good and prevents it from seemingly like it just hands you the clues and fleshes out the environment.  It sometimes though has adjacent hit boxes, which can make you think you already examined something like "the security office" when in fact there is both "the security office and the computer on it."  as hit detection spots.  A bit better layout on a few screens would've fixed this, but it's a passable enough job there as is.  talk and present work pretty reasonably, giving a few options on things that can be asked and while not being hugely flexible, at the same time, are fully acceptable within the median of the genre.

There's only one thing left to go over of note in this mode and well, it's a moderate problem.  The game changes the rules on how you should behave through it.  And not expanding changes such as "You can jump twice  where you used to jump once" but behavioral changing ones such as "Before, folks will require no evidence at all to discuss things if you ask them questions on it.  Now questions won't show up as an option without showing them the relevant stuff".  The end result isn't a bad  one, but it's one that should've been layered in from the beginning requiring a player to get more skilled at it rather than suddenly.  The result of the sudden shift (and lack of penalty for doing actions!) is evident in Ginrai's statement on how he presents evidence "I just show them everything."  The suddenness of the shift makes this kind of behavior likely, which wouldn't arise quite so naturally if it was made part of the behavioral rules from the beginning.  It still could (due to lack of any penalty from showing all the evidence and prevention from showing 'bad' evidence), but without the sudden shift, it'd be more likely that the players would simply grow more and more used to dishing out evidence when they wanted answers on things.  This game changes these kinds of rules on you 3 times throughout five cases, which felt a little much.

Now court mode is where all the exciting parts happen.  You fight through cross-examinations and evidence to try and prove your client innocent in extremely and openly rigged cases.  You can lose in this mode.  You generally won't, but it is possible.  When you do, most the time, it's because this is interactive fiction and not a game, oddly enough.  Where a game would generally offer some rules you could go by, this game will often place you in positions where you are not supposed to make clever conclusions.  The 'game' in court is not about building a case, finding contradictions, or anything like that.  It's identifying what the game wants you to do and doing it.  It's entirely handled during cross-examination sections of testimony.  The game often gives you clues if you scroll to the end of the testimony.  You on any testimony section can press or reveal evidence.  In general, the game will let you press every statement the witness makes and while there is a 'limit', it's vague, intentionally undefined, and often impossible to hit.  In fact, if you 'do' hit it?  You're probably supposed to.  Yeah, it's that kind of thing.  It'd probably be really annoying...except:

This is often where the writing and animations are most amusing.  Even doing stuff 'wrong' in the fiction often results in amusing lines.  You CAN lose this mode.  You have 5 'wrongs' and then you lose the case and have to start over from the beginning of that trial day.  Said wrongs are very forgiving.  Pretty much everything except for presenting the wrong evidence repeatedly will work.  The mode is built around the interactive fiction and does very well at that.

As a game, it's not nearly as good.  The writing often over-rules interactive solutions in favor of a deus ex machina changing the circumstances.  Sometimes this goes as far as 'Guilty" being put up before a deus ex machina.  It's more about tossing out an exciting story than really letting you be clever within the mechanics.  Pointing out contradictions early often gets you penalized.  The game will often prevent you from commenting on things that would lead to decisions early, and equally so, prevent you from not walking into logic traps of your opponents.  The game wants a back and forth going on, whether or not it can actually provide it to the player's skill level.

So...as a game?  Not so good.  As interactive fiction, pretty darn good.  The most 'awkward' case ends up really being case 5, where they move towards trying to make more  of a game out of the mechanics, but all of them are pretty much enjoyable to read.

Dracos